


Here We Go Alone

by Alvitr



Series: Strange Meeting [2]
Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sick Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-07-30
Packaged: 2018-04-11 23:57:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4457480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alvitr/pseuds/Alvitr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>December, 1918. The war is over, but a new menace must be battled. Strange tries to cure the flu epidemic - but suffers consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here We Go Alone

 

> “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so.”

 Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill”

_December 1918_

 

A week had passed since Strange had fallen ill.

 

Norrell had known it would happen. He had been waiting for it. And yet, when it did befall, it was a dreadful shock. That morning when Strange came home after staying all night at the influenza wards, face ghastly white and coated with perspiration, eyes wide and manic, Norrell had stood for a moment utterly frozen in disbelief.

 

When he had recovered, he had been astounded, and angry, that anyone had let him leave the wards when it was so clear that he was ill. But Strange had murmured in a tired and distracted voice, as he struggled to unbutton his coat, that it had only come over him on the way home, so rapidly that he’d barely realized what was happening until he was nearly to Hanover Square. Norrell watched his fingers fruitlessly sliding over the surface of the button third from the top, and moved to undo it for him; but Strange stepped backward suddenly.

 

“No,” he said. “You must not, Gilbert. I don’t want you to catch it, either.”

 

“But –“ He must do something; surely Strange could not care for himself.

 

“Call for a doctor, if there’s any who can spare the time,” Strange said, and began to climb wearily up the stairs, overcoat still on and half unbuttoned. “And continue your research.”

 

His research. He had, with great hesitation, embarked on a search for something that could stop the ‘flu, at Strange’s insistence. He had not held out much help. It was true that there were many magical cures for medicine, but they were often only useful on an individual basis. He had turned to the works of magicians who had lived during the Black Death, and read, with no small amount of despair, of their failures at containing the spread of the plague. “What use is magic, then,” Strange had said when he had told him of his findings, “if it cannot help humankind at a moment such as this?” He had been exhausted even then, and this was only early in November, mere weeks after the disease had spread through the city.[1] Strange, unable to cure the sick, had found ways to use magic to help otherwise – boiling water, soothing nightmares, cleaning sheets, clearing the air of the stench of sickness. All the myriad manners of using magic which long ago Norrell had once shuddered, and yet now, he said nothing about it  to Strange at all.

 

And now Strange was ill.

 

He called for a doctor. One came, eventually, his nose and mouth swathed in a bandage, and disappeared into the room Strange had sequestered himself into (not the one they habitually shared) for what seemed to Norrell like eternity. While he waited he paged listlessly through a description of an attempted magical quarantine of Harrowgate in 1349. Useless. Utterly useless.

 

Eventually, the doctor came downstairs. “He has a high fever,” he said, his voice muffled through the bandages, “but his respiration isn’t too affected yet.” He took a card from his pocket. “See if you can get a nurse to come around. They’re short on staff, obviously, but you might be lucky. If you go in there, be sure to cover your mouth and nose.”

 

“But how should we treat the sickness?” Norrell said.

 

“Well,” the doctor said, picking up his case, “you can try Vick’s, and cough medicine, or a dosage of whiskey. But to be perfectly honest, none of those seem to make much difference. His body will either fight off the infection, or it won’t.[2]” And with that he left. He was a very busy man, and had many more patients to see.

 

Norrell sat for some time in a deep despondency, before rousing himself. He made arrangements for a nurse to come the next day, found a bottle of whiskey in the drinks cabinet in the sitting room, and then, summoning a protective barrier around his head that Strange used in the wards and had insisted Norrell learn (though it did not seem to have protected him in the end), he climbed the stairs to the bedroom.

 

Strange was sleeping fitfully, his face no longer pale but flushed with fever. He woke as Norrell closed the door behind him. “No,” he said, his voice hoarse. “You mustn’t come in here, Gilbert –“

 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Norrell said. He measured out a glass of whiskey and held it out, but Strange’s eyes were closed. “Drink this,” he said, and held the glass against Strange’s mouth. He helped him take a long sip, then drew away carefully as Strange began to cough.

 

It was startling to see how quickly he had deteriorated; this morning he’d seemed hale and hearty, if weary and grim-faced. Now he looked as though the simple act of staying conscious was a great effort for him. But Norrell had heard of such things; perfectly healthy individuals who were at death’s door in the span of a single day. All because of this dreadful disease.

 

Strange finished his whiskey, and then Norrell furnished him with some water. He washed his hands well, and then set spells to alert him if Strange needed help in the night. When he left the room, Strange had again fallen asleep.

 

So it had continued over these past few days. The nurse came as regularly as she could, and Norrell cared for Strange as best as he was able, often surprising himself in his own stoicism. While in Strange’s presence, it was as though he were possessed by someone made of much sturdier stuff than he had ever been; why, he nearly thought it might be the spirit of John Childermass. But when he left the room at last he came back to himself. Often he found himself shaking violently with restrained fear and anxiety. Yet he must return and do it all again. He could not let Jonathan down.

 

For a time it seemed that Strange was improving; his fever broke and he regained his color. But within the last day he had suddenly relapsed. The doctor came again, and after examining him, shook his head and told Norrell that influenza often followed this pattern. “Now is the most critical time,” he said. “We will know within the next day or two whether he may persevere against the disease.”

 

Norrell could not bring himself to leave the room that night. He sat in a chair by Strange’s bedside, a book open on his lap. Not a book of magic – he had exhausted all possible avenues in research on this matter. Instead he had drawn down a book from Strange’s shelf: Daniel Defoe’s _A Journal of the Plague Year_. It was not something he would have ordinarily been given to read, uncomfortably set somewhere between history and fiction. Now he read with a sort of grim fascination of how the Londoners of a hundred years before his birth had used “ _charms, philtres, exorcisms, amulets, and I know not what preparations, to fortify the body with them against the plague; as if the plague was not the hand of God, but a kind of possession of an evil spirit, and that it was to be kept off with crossings, signs of the zodiac, papers tied up with so many knots, and certain words or figures written on them, as particularly the word Abracadabra, formed in triangle or pyramid…_ ” and thought how history seemed doomed to repeat itself.[3]

 

When he could not read any more, he sat and watched Strange breathe. He had been tossing and turning earlier in the evening, but now he was still, and yet his slumber did not seem peaceful. His brow was drawn and his mouth was etched in a tight line. At one point his hands twitched and his face spasmed, and he murmured something. Norrell thought it might have been _Arabella_.

 

_What shall I do?_ He suddenly wondered, and found himself thinking of what Strange had said weeks ago (though now it felt much, much longer than a mere seventeen or eighteen days): _What use is magic, then, if it cannot help humankind at a moment such as this?_ He felt the truth of those words now far keenly than he had ever thought he might. _Is this how Jonathan feels all of the time?_ He thought it must be. These emotions – this helplessness, this weight of responsibility, this fear more powerful than any of the terrors he had worked himself up to in all his long life – they were terrible, like successive stabs through the heart. He was not sure he would ever quite recover from them.

 

If Strange died, he was not sure he would ever recover from that, either.

 

Strange inhaled, slow and ragged, and then almost immediately exhaled, as though he could not catch his breath.

 

Norrell stood and closed the book. He laid it down on the chair. Then he approached the bed.

 

“Please,” he said aloud, to no one in particular. “Please. Tell me what to do.”

 

Strange muttered again in his sleep. It sounded to Norrell as though he said _Gilbert_ this time.

 

 He extended his hand. It was shaking violently. He felt again as though he were possessed. He did not know what he was doing or why. He simply did it. He laid his hand on Strange’s chest. And then he gathered his hand into a fist and _pulled_.

 

At what, he did not know, precisely. But whatever it may have been, it had a substantial weight to it. Once he began tugging at it, he realized immediately that he needed both hands. The resistance was almost excruciating. If Norrell had been a man who had ever gardened in his life, he might have likened it to pulling at an incredibly stubborn weed; but he had not. Or if he had ever worked a ship, as Childermass had once done, he might have compared it to pulling in the rigging, but of course he had never done that either. Norrell could not find anything to which he could liken this experience, and in truth he had not the mental capacity to try, for every single part of his being was focused at the task at hand. He did not know if he was strong enough for it.

 

And yet somehow, he held his ground. Slowly, but surely, he seemed to make some kind of progress, pulling back bit by bit. At last, after struggling for what felt like ages, the _thing_ in his hands gave way. He stumbled back, still holding tight, but with nothing pulling back from the other end. He looked at what he held for the first time and saw a great darkness, slick and evil looking, and had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

 

“Gilbert!” he heard, and looked up to see Jonathan Strange – his dearest friend and boldest enemy, his partner, his lover – sitting up in the bed, wide-eyed and stunned, and very, very conscious. Strange held out a hand and frowned, narrowing his eyes. All at once, the mass in Norrell’s hands turned icy cold; he dropped it in surprise, and it shattered. Strange whispered something, and waved his hand, and the shards of ice evaporated at once and disappeared.

 

Norrell stood in some degree of shock, staring at the floor, and then looked up again at Strange. He looked disheveled, but well. Perfectly fine. “Jonathan!” he said, and his voice did not sound like his own. It was too thick with emotion, too deep, and Norrell realized only then that he was crying. He might have been the whole time, for his face felt stiff and damp. He went at once to the bed and embraced Strange. “Jonathan,” he said again, tremulously.

 

“What did you do?” Strange said. He pulled Norrell back and looked at him. “Gilbert, what in all the worlds did you just do?”

 

Norrell shook his head. “I do not know,” he said with dismay. Indeed, the entire affair seemed clouded in haze to him now. “I am sorry, Jonathan, I – I have no idea.”

 

Strange stared at him with amazement, and Norrell thought, _He is wondering how we will use it to help others … he will be angry if I cannot do it again, and I am not sure that I can._ But instead, Strange laughed. It was an amazing sound, one Norrell did not think he had heard in very long, and he clenched at Strange’s arms in a sudden fit of possessiveness, as though he needed to ensure that the other man was really there. Then Strange pulled him down and kissed him. His mouth tasted stale and faintly medicinal, but Norrell kissed him back forcefully, as though he might never have the chance to kiss him again. And indeed, he had thought that he might not.

 

When at last they parted, Strange held him close, their faces nearly touching, and stared into his eyes. Norrell began to feel uncomfortable; his face became hot, and he looked away. He heard Strange laugh, not in the joyous way he had at first, but a fond sort of chuckle, and then Strange embraced him tightly, Norrell’s head slotting easily into the spot against Strange’s neck. “Thank you,” Strange whispered. “Thank you, Gilbert.”

 

“What is it that you are thanking me for, exactly?” Norrell said, trying to keep his voice steady with some difficulty.

 

“Why, saving my life, I suppose.”

 

Norrell pulled away. He pressed one hand to his cheek; it felt as though it were burning. “As I said, I have no idea how I did it – it was very impulsive. It was not in any of the books. Jonathan, it’s unlikely I could replicate it – I – I will try, of course.”

 

“Do not worry, Gilbert,” Strange said. “We will find the answer … together.”

 

That night, they slept together in their own bed again. Strange slept deeply, peacefully. When Gilbert woke in the middle of the night, he was still there, legs spread out wide under the covers to occupy the space that Norrell habitually left in his tight curled up position. Norrell reached out one hand and touched, lightly, the closest part of Strange’s body next to him, which was his bare arm, the skin smooth and warm. He struggled not to be overwhelmed with gratitude that he was not alone. Gratitude towards what, exactly? Magic, he supposed. Whatever it was that had taken pity on him in that crucial moment and given him the power, however briefly, to do what he had been so certain he could not.

 

 

[1] This was in fact the second wave of the pandemic, but the first, in late spring and early summer, had not been so deadly. Though deadliness of the flu was not being heavily reported in the newspapers – the government was suppressing it to prevent hysteria – there were already hundreds dead in London, thousands throughout the country.

[2] Much of the difficulty in treating the Spanish flu of 1918 lay in the fact that doctors had previously believed influenza was a bacteria. It is actually caused by a virus. This hampered their ability to create a vaccine; most treatments they tried were useless; and attempts at prevention, such as wearing facial masks, were useless, as viruses could penetrate the cloth, unlike bacteria.

[3] Defoe had a deep dislike of magicians, for his own experiment in theoretical magic, in the form of a slim pamphlet entitled [_A System of Magick; or, a History of the Black Art_](https://archive.org/details/systemofmagic00defo) (1727) was widely mocked by the magical community of England for its inaccuracies and his own lack of qualifications.

**Author's Note:**

> I just read "Station Eleven", and was struck by how we always envision these epidemics as inevitably leading to the downfall of civilization. Yet the Spanish flu killed MILLIONS of people around the world, on the tail end of a war that also killed MILLIONS of people, and they had absolutely no useful tools to to fight it, most places didn't have running water, there weren't vaccines for it ... yet somehow the world kept on ticking, and these days almost nobody even knows about that pandemic.


End file.
